Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
Complete Streets Bill Introduced in Senate
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Earlier this week, 12 senators, led by Tom Harkin (D-IA), introduced the Complete Streets Act of 2011 (S.1056), a companion to the House bill we reported on a few weeks back. The purpose of the bills is to push states and metropolitan planning organizations to fully consider incorporating pedestrian and bicycle safety measures when roads […]
GOP Proposal to Privatize the Northeast Corridor Meets Resistance
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House Republicans, led by Transportation Committee leaders John Mica (R-FL) and Bill Schuster (R-PA), have a plan to take the Northeast Corridor out of Amtrak’s control and privatize it. They’ve long called Amtrak a “Soviet-style operation” that loses money. Mica said that ridership of the NEC hasn’t changed since 1977, the year after Amtrak took […]
Boxer: Transpo Funding Will Rise in Senate Bill, Bike/Ped Will Be Preserved
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Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, just addressed reporters about the progress of the transportation bill. Rather than holding funding at SAFETEA-LU levels, as we previously reported and as the EPW statement indicated, the committee is planning a $339.2 billion bill – current spending plus inflation, plus an expanded TIFIA […]
Senate Transportation Bill, MAP-21, Freezes Spending at Current Levels
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Note: See follow-up post, “Boxer: Transpo Funding Will Rise in Senate Bill, Bike/Ped Will Be Preserved” for updates, including clarification that the new bill will fund transportation at current levels plus inflation and an expanded TIFIA program. The Environment and Public Works Committee just released an outline of some core principles of its transportation reauthorization […]
T4America: Just Like Plane Crashes, Pedestrian Deaths Are a National Issue
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Over the last decade, nearly 48,000 people were killed in the simple act of walking. Many of them were on streets built only to accommodate fast-moving cars, without safe places for people to walk or cross the street. Transportation for America’s new report, “Dangerous by Design,” includes rankings of states and metro areas, but you […]
Dangerous By Design: How the U.S. Builds Roads That Kill Pedestrians
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If you had to cross this road on your walk to work, wouldn’t you rather drive? Millions of Americans live in communities without safe places to walk. And so they either don’t walk, adding to traffic congestion with every trip, or they do walk, risking joining the ranks of the 47,700 pedestrians killed and 688,000 […]
Mica and Nadler Duke It Out on the Pages of Politico Over Transpo Funding
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In an op-ed in Politico this morning, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) calls for getting rid of waste and inefficiencies in the transportation system, shifting more power to the states, and “doing more with less.” The emphasis, of course, being on the word “less.” Mica is still gunning for a bill at existing […]
Scenes From National Bike to Work Day
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Fifty years ago the League of American Bicyclists organized the first Bike to Work Day. Today, more than 500 events were held across the country to encourage people to “bike the drive,” as they say. More than 41 million Americans have participated in National Bike to Work Week at least once, according to a 2002 […]
Experts Agree: Six-Year Transportation Bill Won’t Pass This Year
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At times in this whole reauthorization process, it’s been hard to see the way forward. House Republicans refuse to deficit-spend their way out of the funding conundrum, and Democrats haven’t gotten behind a coherent plan to come up with more revenues, though they’re still arguing for a bigger bill. Still, I’ve been reporting on the […]
Good News From the Senate: Transit Operating Assistance and Much More
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Today’s Senate Banking Committee hearing held some good news for transit riders. Unintuitive though it may be, Banking has jurisdiction over public transportation in the Senate. While in the House, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee handles every aspect of the reauthorization, in the Senate the bill gets carved up. Environment and Public Works is taking […]
A Bicycling Health Checkup For Your City
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Nice, right? This table of bike data from Albuquerque is one of 244 handy info charts compiled by the League of American Bicyclists using census information in the 2009 American Community Survey. You can check out your town’s bicycle vital signs at the League of American Bicyclists’ website. Combine this data with the amazing state- […]
AASHTO Approves First New Bicycle Routes in 30 Years
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In recent months, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has circulated a new roadway design guide that incorporates more bicycle facilities, though still leaving out many designs that are embraced by cities around the world for their improved safety outcomes. Separately, AASHTO recognized that it was putting its foot in its collective […]